“This is nothing less than historic,” said Attorney General Holder. “Clearly, criminal justice reform is an idea whose time has come.  And thanks to a robust and growing national consensus – a consensus driven not by political ideology, but by the promising work that’s underway – we are bringing about a paradigm shift, and witnessing a historic sea change, in the way our nation approaches these issues.”

Full Speech

Okay, he might have been directly speaking about the declining prison population – which is great, and only partly connecting the end of marijuana prohibition to the declining prison population, but we’ve seen the evidence and read the great Rolling Stone article about the last days of the war on marijuana.

We do believe that we’re part of the historic sea change, here at Sea Change and want to share the etymology of the phrase, which comes from The Tempest, by Shakespeare.  It is a song sung by the spirit Ariel to Ferdinand after his father apparently drowns:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.